I had lunch last week with Mitch Joel (t/w) and Alistair Croll (t/w). Amid lots of brain-exploding chatter, Mitch had a nice idea: how about each week we each pick a good link for each of the other two guys. So, every week, six good links, specially chosen. Our own personalized weekly Givemesomethingtoread, that other [...]
I have a post up over at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change blog, Sifting through all these books: …We have a massive and growing supply and demand imbalance in the book business. And, as the technologies for creating and distributing books becomes trivial, the supply of books is just going to keep growing exponentially. There is [...]
We are getting to a point where all data – web sites, books – are accessible as raw, structured datasets, to a point when we users can/and will do as we wish with the outputs. This is the case with web sites now. You can force your browser to display things in a particular way. [...]
I was invited to do a panel on Social Media for Authors at the Writers’ Union of Canada AGM. Writer Nichole McGill was the moderator, and I was joined by the wonderful Jenny Bullough, of the visionary publishing house Harlequin. (Harlequin is the most clued-in about digital of all the publishers I know of, along [...]
I just posted this to Twitter, but I think it might be important enough to commit in the hard stone of a blog. And the thought is the following: The distinction between “the internet” & “books” is totally totally arbitrary, and will disappear in 5 years. Start adjusting now.
In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani takes on the Internet, remix culture, post-modernism and the technology-induced Decline of Western Civilization. She quotes the usual suspects: Jaron Lanier, Andrew Keen, Nicholas Carr as well as Cass Sunstein, Farhad Manjoo. Picking on traditional media has become a tiresome sport. Much more interesting to explore successful new [...]
Dinner (beef stew and mashed potatoes, if I recall correctly) was smelling delicious and ready to be eaten. We wanted to watch a movie. We’ve got a subscription to Zip.ca, and I have a habit of listing every avant-guard movie from 1927 I can find, with the odd bit of candy. So we often have [...]
My colleague, co-founder, and the chief architect and getter-doner at Book Oven, Stephanie Troeth has proposed a moderated panel at SXSW this year called: Beyond Publishing: When Every Book is Connected to Everyone We have an all-star line-up who have agreed to join us (if SXSW agrees to give us some space to talk): Kassia [...]
danah boyd points to a study of Twitter usage by PearAnalytics, that concludes: 40.55% of the tweets they coded are pointless babble; 37.55% are conversational; 8.7% have “pass along value”; 5.85% are self-promotional; 3.75% are spam; and ::gasp:: only 3.6% are news.” As danah boyd suggests in her first sentence, studies like this are irritating. [...]
Roberto Rocha of the Montreal Gazette has a good article about Book Oven and the new publishing landscape, with a nice pic out the window of the office (with me blocking the view, unfortunately): Before the Internet, when a writer could not find a publisher to print and sell a manuscript, he could take matters [...]